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Overturning the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for the second time, the United States Supreme Court ruled on February 19, 2019, that Texas death-row prisoner Bobby James Moore is intellectually disabled and may not be executed. In an unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court reversed the latest Texas appeals court decision that would have allowed Moore’s execution, saying the state court had relied on many of the same improper lay stereotypes and committed many of the same errors that had led the Justices two years ago to strike down Texas’s “outlier” approach to determining intellectual disability. The Court said that the Texas ruling, “when taken as a whole and when read in the light both of our prior opinion and the trial court record, rests upon analysis too much of which too closely resembles what we previously found improper.”

This decision marked the second time the Supreme Court had reversed a Court of Criminal Appeals denial of Moore’s intellectual disability claim. In 2014, a Texas trial court, applying prevailing clinical standards, found that Moore was intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty under the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia. However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) overturned that decision, saying Moore had not satisfied a Texas-specific standard called the “Briseño factors” (named after the Texas court decision that announced them). In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected the use of these factors, calling them an unscientific “invention” of the TCCA that was “untied to any acknowledged source” and lacked support from “any authority, medical or judicial.” The Court criticized the TCCA’s reliance upon “lay stereotypes” about what people with intellectual disability can and cannot do and its misplaced focus on things Moore was able to do in a structured prison setting instead of considering his life history of impairments in daily adaptive functioning, and directed the TCCA to reconsider the issue applying appropriate diagnostic standards.

When the case returned to the state courts, numerous groups, including the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, filed friend-of-the-court briefs asserting that Moore met the prevailing medical definitions of intellectual disability. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office agreed with Moore and conceded that his death sentence should be vacated. Nonetheless, over the sharp dissent of three judges, the TCCA again upheld Moore’s death sentence. With the backing of the mental health professional associations, Special Olympics Chairman Tim Shriver, and a group of prominent conservative leaders who described the TCCA’s flouting of the 2017 Supreme Court ruling as “inimical to the rule of law,” Moore again asked the Supreme Court to intervene. When Harris County prosecutors again agreed that Moore was entitled to relief, the Texas Attorney General’s office attempted to intervene in the case to defend the TCCA’s ruling. The Supreme Court reversed, writing: “We … agree with Moore and the prosecutor that, on the basis of the trial court record, Moore has shown he is a person with intellectual disability.” Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, dissented, accusing the majority of improperly engaging in factfinding and failing to provide clarity to lower courts.

Cliff Sloan, a lawyer representing Moore, praised the ruling: “We greatly appreciate today’s important ruling from the Supreme Court, and we are very pleased that justice will be done for Bobby Moore.” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg also released a statement: “The Harris County District Attorney’s Office disagreed with our state’s highest court and the attorney general to stand for Justice in this case. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed."

Bills to repeal and replace the death penalty with non-capital punishments have gained new traction across the United States in 2019 as a result of opposition to the death penalty among ideologically conservative legislators. That movement – buoyed by fiscal and pro-life conservatives, conservative law-reform advocates, and the deepening involvement of the Catholic Church in death-penalty abolition – has led to unprecedented successes in numerous houses of state legislatures and moved repeal efforts closer to fruition in a number of deeply Republican states. In 2019, conservative legislators are leading the call for death-penalty abolition in conservative-leaning states such as Wyoming, Montana, and Kentucky, and playing a critical role in bipartisan efforts to repeal or reform capital punishment in Virginia and New Hampshire.

The surprise strength of a death-penalty repeal bill in Wyoming is emblematic of the growing Republican abolition movement. There, in an overwhelmingly Republican legislature, a bill to replace the death penalty with life without parole garnered significant support from both parties and passed the state house and a senate committee before falling short in the full senate. In Kentucky and Montana, Republican legislators have introduced abolition legislation and are attempting to build coalition support, and in Virginia, the Republican-controlled state Senate passed a bill to ban the death penalty for people with severe mental illness. Conservatives have said they oppose capital punishment because of pro-life beliefs, a desire to reduce government spending, and the lack of deterrent effect. In New Hampshire, a bill to abolish the death penalty passed the legislature with bipartisan support, but was vetoed in 2018. The legislature has renewed bipartisan repeal efforts in 2019.

The Wyoming House of Representatives voted (36-21) on February 1 to pass HB 145, a bill to abolish the death penalty. The bill garnered the support of a majority of House Republicans, all the house Democrats who voted, and the chamber’s lone Independent. It then unanimously passed the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee on February 13, before being defeated in the full Senate by a vote of 12-18. In the Senate, nine Republicans and all three Democrats voted in favor of abolition. The bill was introduced by Republican Rep. Jared Olsen of Cheyenne with Republican and Democratic co-sponsors in both houses. Senate co-sponsor Brian Boner (R – Converse) said, “We have an obligation to have a justice system that is blind and based on facts, and not based on what we wished it was or what it used to be.” Olsen said he was concerned about the number of exonerations from death row. “It is way too much authority to vest in our government, and we get it wrong,” he said. Concerns about costs convinced Sen. Bill Landen (R – Casper) to vote for abolition. "I finally decided that I can't go home and feel good about explaining to people all of those myriad of cuts we've made to the state budget and then defend expenditures like this, which have gone on for years and years and years," he said. Wyoming spends an estimated $750,000 per year on legal costs associated with the death penalty, but has not executed anyone since 1992 nor imposed a death sentence since 2004.

Kentucky House Majority Whip Chad McCoy (R – Nelson) said he hopes to get support for his abolition bill from Catholic legislators who have a moral opposition to the death penalty, as well as fiscal conservatives who see it as a costly, ineffective government program. “When you talk about death penalty, a lot of people immediately want to have a criminal justice angle on it or a morality angle. And mine is purely economics,” he said. Kentucky also rarely uses the death penalty. Its last execution was in 2008 and its last death sentence was in 2014. State Representative Mike Hopkins, R-Missoula, the sponsor of Montana’s bill to replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole, told a House committee on February 18 that the state’s death penalty was simply ineffective. The two people sentenced to death in the state have been on death row for thirty years, he said, and “there is no logical measurement that 30 years equals a death sentence. … Regardless of how you feel because of capital punishment, nobody is dying from it.”

A February 4, 2019 article in the criminal justice newsletter, The Appeal, features the case of Demetrius Howard, a California prisoner sentenced to death for a crime in which he didn’t kill anyone. Howard was sentenced to death in 1995 for his participation in a robbery in which another man, Mitchell Funches, shot and killed Sherry Collins. Howard was never accused of firing a shot and he has consistently maintained that he neither expected nor intended that anyone would be killed. But under California’s felony murder law, he was eligible for the death penalty because he participated in the robbery. In a letter to The Appeal, Howard wrote, “I am no saint or some angel. I’ve made my share of wrongs, but I haven’t killed no one [or] told anyone to kill someone.”

California is one of twenty states that allow the execution of defendants who neither killed nor intended that a killing take place. The controversial practice has attracted the most attention in the state of Texas, where at least six prisonershave been executed despite undisputed evidence that they were not involved in the killing itself. In Howard’s case, the man who actually shot Collins, Mitchell Funches, received a sentence of life without parole when the jury in his trial could not reach a unanimous decision on whether to sentence him to life or death. In 2018, California passed a law that narrowed the scope of the felony murder law, making defendants liable for murder only if they were the killer, solicited the killer, or acted with reckless indifference to human life. The change is retroactive, but does not apply to Howard because the jury found that he had “acted with reckless indifference to human life” before it sentenced him to death.

Howard’s death sentence is also a by-product of outlier death-penalty practices in San Bernardino County. San Bernardino is one of five Southern California counties that imposed more death sentences between 2010 and 2015 than 99.5% of U.S. counties, earning the region the nickname “the new death belt.” In 1993, shortly before Howard was sentenced to death, there were 10 active capital trials in the county, and then-District Attorney Dennis Kottmeier said he was considering seeking it in two other cases. At the time, Kottmeier told the San Bernardino County Sun, “That’s higher than I’ve ever seen it. At any given time in the past the number pending seemed to be about six.” He attributed the high number of capital cases to a high rate of violent crime, as well as state laws passed in 1990 and 1993 that expanded the list of death-eligible crimes. The California Attorney General’s 2017 report, Homicide in California, shows that despite its disproportionate pursuit of capital punishment, San Bernardino’s higher-than-average murder rate has remained the same from 1997 to 2017, while murder rates have declined statewide and in many of California counties during that period.

As execution drugs have become more difficult for states to lawfully obtain and problematic executions have become more frequent, states have expanded their efforts to shield their execution-related activities from public scrutiny. In the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC, Robin Konrad, former DPIC Director of Research and Special Projects, joins Executive Director Robert Dunham and current Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue to discuss DPIC’s November 2018 report, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States. Konrad, the lead author of the report, is now an Assistant Professor of Lawyering Skills at Howard University School of Law. The discussion covers the recent expansion of secrecy in the use of the death penalty, the reasons for the unavailability of lethal-injection drugs, and the problems that have resulted from execution secrecy.

Secrecy policies are ubiquitous in the states that are currently attempting to carry out executions, Konrad explains. “Everybody has some type of secrecy provision” related to the sources of execution drugs or the way executions are carried out, Konrad says. Secrecy provisions conceal the sources of the drugs states obtain and the identities and qualifications of the execution team, and restrict the portions of the execution witnesses are permitted to see and hear. The podcast discusses these issues and questionable measures states have taken to hide potential problems, including Florida and Oklahoma taping down prisoners’ hands so witness cannot see them clench their fists in reaction to the drugs, and Virginia and Nebraska closing curtains to conceal how long the IV insertion process takes or the moments just before and after the prisoners’ death.

The episode also includes a discussion of the consequences of secrecy, including illegal actions that have been discovered only by accident or through investigative journalism. “We’ve seen states acting in a way that is often illegal, where we’ve seen states purchasing drugs overseas in an illegal manner from companies or individuals that are less than reputable. We've seen the prison officials driving money in the middle of the night across state lines to exchange money for drugs and drugs for money. We have seen the states using pharmacies that have had numerous violations. One pharmacy that was used by Missouri had … 1800 violations of state and federal law,” Konrad says. The podcast concludes with a discussion of the ways in which secrecy undermines democratic principles of open government and hides problematic state practices. “When we’re looking at [a] government ... for the people, by the people, the people should know what is going on and states shouldn't be hiding information about the most serious punishment that they carry out against their citizens,” Konrad says. “I don’t see how in any principled system of justice, you can sustain a system that basically is grounded in secrecy, grounded in hiding what’s going on from the public. You have to be open, you have to be honest, you have to be transparent, you have to be trustworthy,” adds Dunham.

The U.S. Supreme Court has found itself in the crossfire of harsh criticism from across the political spectrum after its intervention in a death penalty case allowed Alabama to execute a Muslim prisoner without providing him access to a religious adviser. Evangelical Christians and Catholic Bishops joined editorial boards and commentators from the New York Times to the National Review in condemning the Court’s 5-4 decision permitting the execution of Domineque Ray (pictured) on February 7, 2019. Los Angeles Times deputy editorial page editor Jon Healey wrote: “If you need a rabbi, an imam or other non-Christian spiritual advisor to accompany you into the death chamber in Alabama, God help you. Because the U.S. Supreme Court won’t.” Libertarian professor Ilya Somin, of the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, called the decision a “grave injustice” and the conservative National Review headlined a column by its senior writer David French, “The Supreme Court Upholds a Grave Violation of the First Amendment.”

Alabama scheduled Ray’s execution on November 6. Undisclosed to Ray and the other death-row prisoners, Alabama’s secret execution protocol mandated that a Christian chaplain—and no other religious adviser—be present in the execution chamber. Ray sought to be provided the same access to religious comfort that the state afforded Christian prisoners, and requested that his imam be allowed in the execution chamber. The state denied his request on January 23, 2019, saying that the chaplain was allowed in the chamber because he was a trained employee of the Department of Corrections, but an untrained volunteer imam would present security concerns. Five days later, Ray sought a stay of execution alleging that Alabama’s policy violated his First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. A federal appeals court granted a stay to allow briefing on the issue, but the U.S. Supreme Court, in a contentious 5-4 decision, reversed the decision. In a dissent joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan wrote, “Under that policy, a Christian prisoner may have a minister of his own faith accompany him into the execution chamber to say his last rites. But if an inmate practices a different religion — whether Islam, Judaism, or any other — he may not die with a minister of his own faith by his side. That treatment goes against the Establishment Clause’s core principle of denominational neutrality.”

Christian leaders raised concerns about the decision’s disregard of human dignity and its broader impact on religious liberty. In a news release issued under the heading “U.S. Bishops’ Chairmen Condemn Decision Preventing Muslim Man from Receiving Appropriate Spiritual Care at Execution,” the chairs of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops committees for Religious Liberty and for Domestic Justice and Human Development called the death penalty itself “an affront to human dignity.” The statement said “Mr. Ray bore the further indignity of being refused spiritual care in his last moments of life.” The committee chairs—Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz of Louisville, Kentucky, and Bishop Frank J. Dewane of Venice, Florida—wrote: “This unjust treatment is disturbing to people of all faiths, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or otherwise. People deserve to be accompanied in death by someone who shares their faith. It is especially important that we respect this right for religious minorities.” In an op-ed for The New York Times, Alan Cross, a pastor and missional strategist with the Montgomery Baptist Association, wrote, “I am not a Muslim. I am an evangelical Christian minister in Alabama. But my religious freedom — everyone’s religious freedom — took a hit when my state decided that instead of slowing down to accommodate religious difference, the execution, which is final and irrevocable, had to go on as scheduled.” Pastor Cross stressed the value of religious diversity, saying “The solution to diversity is not to eliminate religious difference, but rather to work together to be fully who we are, to cultivate a society where religious belief is recognized and accommodated. Mr. Ray’s religious freedom mattered as much as anyone else’s. That freedom is part of what makes America great. When it is lost, it is replaced by a sterility and silence that will ultimately drive us apart.” In its own editorial, the New York Times editorial board called the Supreme Court ruling a “moral failure” that diminished Muslims and compounded the indignity of its prior acquiescence in the travel ban imposed by the Trump administration.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis (pictured) has said he will “strongly consider” commuting the death sentences of the three men on the state’s death row if the state abolishes the death penalty. In a February 7, 2019 interview on Colorado Public Radio, Polis told Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner, “if the legislature sends us a bill to eliminate the death penalty in Colorado, I would sign that bill … [and] I would certainly take that as a strong indication that those who are currently on death row should have their sentences commuted to life in prison.” Polis, who voiced his opposition to the death penalty during his 2018 campaign for governor, reiterated his views during the Colorado Matters interview. “I think it’s not cost effective, I think it’s not an effective deterrent,” he said. “If the State Republicans and Democrats were to say, and I were to sign a bill that said we no longer have the death penalty in Colorado, whether it's formally in the bill or not,” the Governor said, “then I would strongly consider making sure that penalty that is no longer on the books in Colorado is not carried out for anybody who's in that process.”

Colorado’s previous governor, John Hickenlooper, imposed a moratorium on executions in 2013. Hickenlooper said he initially had supported the death penalty, but changed his views when he learned more about the issue: “My whole life I was in favor of the death penalty. But then you get all this information: it costs 10 times, maybe 15 times more money to execute someone than to put someone in prison for life without parole. There’s no deterrence to having capital punishment. And I don’t know about you, but when I get new facts, I’ll change my opinion. I didn’t know all of this stuff.” Former prosecutor and state representative Doug Friednash, who sponsored a bill to expand Colorado’s death penalty to include multiple murders committed during a single criminal episode, has undergone a similar evolution. In a February 1 op-ed in the The Denver Post, Friednash called on the legislature to repeal its capital punishment law. “Twenty-five years ago, as a freshman House Democrat, I sponsored legislation to expand the death penalty,” Friednash wrote. “I was wrong.” The law he supported was used to prosecute James Holmes, who killed 12 people in a shooting at an Aurora movie theater in 2012, and Dexter Lewis, who stabbed five people to death in a Denver bar. Juries sentenced both to life. Holmes’ case, he says, illustrates some of the problems with the death penalty – the law failed to deter Holmes and his capital trial, which resulted in a life sentence, cost taxpayers approximately $5 million. Holmes was tried in Colorado’s 18th Judicial District, where defendants are "four times more likely to face a death prosecution than elsewhere in the state.” All three of the state’s death-row prisoners are Black men who were tried in that district. Friednash concludes, “It’s time to close this chapter in Colorado’s history books. The Colorado legislature should abolish the death penalty this session. And then Gov. Jared Polis should commute the death sentences of our three death-row inmates to life without the possibility of parole.”

In a February 9 editorial, the Boulder Daily Camera also urged the legislature to abolish the death penalty. Citing the lack of deterrent effect and the high cost of capital punishment, the paper wrote: “If the worth of a public policy is its ability to achieve policy objectives, then capital punishment is a failure.” The editorial also noted “great economic, geographic, and racial disparities” in Colorado’s imposition of the death penalty. “The location of the county line in relation to a crime,” it said, “should not determine whether a defendant lives or dies, and neither should the skin color of the accused.” And in conclusion, it pointed to former Governor Bill Ritter’s 2011 posthumous pardon of Joe Arridy, who was wrongfully executed by Colorado in 1939 despite what Ritter called “an overwhelming body of evidence” that Arridy was innocent. “The state-sanctioned killing of an innocent person is more morally repugnant than the execution of a guilty one could be morally just,” the editorial board wrote. “For this reason alone — given that innocent people almost certainly die under a regime of capital punishment — Colorado should abolish the death penalty.”

Georgia death-row prisoner Keith Tharpe (pictured, left) and Oklahoma death-row prisoner Julius Jones (pictured, right) are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to grant them new trials after evidence showed that white jurors who described the defendants with racist slurs participated in deciding their cases. The involvement of the racist jurors, the prisoners say, violated their Sixth Amendment rights to impartial juries. A juror in Tharpe’s trial gave a sworn affidavit years after voting to convict Tharpe, in which he wondered “if black people even have souls,” and said, “there are two types of black people: 1. Black folks and 2. N***rs." Tharpe, he wrote, “wasn’t in the ‘good’ black folks category in my book, should get the electric chair for what he did." In Jones’s case, a juror told Jones’s legal team that another juror had said the trial was “a waste of time” and “they should just take the n***r out and shoot him behind the jail.”

Tharpe and Jones argue that two 2017 Supreme Court decisions, Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado and Buck v. Davis, require the Court to reconsider their cases. In Buck, Chief Justice John Roberts declared for the Court that “the law punishes people for what they do, not who they are,” and overturned a death sentence imposed after a psychologist testified that Buck posed a greater risk of future dangerousness because he is black. The Chief Justice wrote that “discrimination on the basis of race, odious in all aspects, is especially pernicious in the administration of justice,” calling racism a “toxin[ that] can be deadly in small doses.” In Peña-Rodriguez, now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for a five-justice majority of the Court that courts may consider a juror’s statement showing he had relied on racial stereotypes to convict a defendant as evidence of a Sixth Amendment violation.

In January 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal appeals court’s refusal to consider Tharpe’s racial discrimination claim. Less than three months later, that court again refused to consider the issue, saying Tharpe had not previously presented it to the state courts. Jones has also repeatedly sought review of claims that racial discrimination has infected his case. He previously asked the Court to overturn his death sentence based on the findings of a 2017 study that showed significant racial disparities in Oklahoma’s death sentencing practices. On January 22, 2019, after having rescheduled consideration of Jones’s appel 25 times, the Court declined to review the case. Samuel Spital, who was co-counsel in Buck’s case and is lead counsel on the brief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s friend-of-the-court brief supporting Tharpe, said of Tharpe and Jones, “We know that these two men are facing execution at least in part because they’re black. Under those circumstances, the state just doesn’t have an interest in enforcing a death sentence, and for that reason, the procedural obstacles that you would have with respect to certain other claims should not be part of the analysis.” The cases are considered a bellwether of the post-Kennedy Court’s commitment to racial justice.

In a 5-4 decision that Justice Elena Kagan characterized as “profoundly wrong,” the U.S. Supreme Court on February 7, 2019 permitted Alabama to execute a Muslim death-row prisoner, Domineque Ray (pictured), who had claimed that the state’s execution process discriminated against him because of his religion. Without explanation, the Court asserted that Ray had waited too long to challenge a provision in Alabama’s execution protocol that made a Christian chaplain part of the state’s execution team and prohibited other religious advisors from being present in the execution chamber. Ray argued that Alabama’s practice constituted an establishment of religion that discriminated against non-Christians. During federal court hearings on the constitutionality of the policy, Alabama withdrew its requirement that the chaplain be present in the execution chamber. However, it continued to reject Ray’s request that his imam—a prison-approved spiritual advisor—be permitted in the execution chamber. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Ray was likely to succeed on his religious discrimination claim, scheduled briefing in his case, and stayed his execution. The Supreme Court reversed, without addressing the constitutional issue.

Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor dissented. Quoting prior Supreme Court decisions, Kagan wrote, “‘The clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.’ But the State’s policy does just that. Under that policy, a Christian prisoner may have a minister of his own faith accompany him into the execution chamber to say his last rites. But if an inmate practices a different religion—whether Islam, Judaism, or any other—he may not die with a minister of his own faith by his side. That treatment goes against the Establishment Clause’s core principle of denominational neutrality.” In asserting that its execution process complied with constitutional guarantees of religious freedom, the Alabama Attorney General’s office told the federal courts: “Like any other inmate, Ray has been and will be given opportunities to speak with his spiritual adviser, including up to the moment that he is taken into the chamber.” However, Spencer Hahn, one of Ray’s lawyers, said the prison had failed to honor that promise and that Ray lost access to his imam three hours before the execution.

Ray was convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl. No physical evidence linked him to the crimes and a sole prosecution witness, Marcus Owden, implicated Ray. In 2017, Ray’s appeal lawyers discovered for the first time that Owden—who avoided the death penalty by testifying against Ray—had schizophrenia and was suffering from delusions and auditory hallucinations when he accused Ray of the rape and murder and testified against him. Ray’s lawyers argued that the prosecution’s deliberate suppression of this evidence, despite being aware of Owden’s mental illness, violated Ray’s due process rights and entitled him to a new trial. Without comment, the Supreme Court declined to review the claim and denied a stay. Ray was the second person executed in the U.S. in 2019 and the first in Alabama.

Clemency, a film exploring the psychological toll of the death penalty, has been awarded the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Drama at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival on February 2, 2019. The movie, written and directed by Nigerian-American filmmaker Chinonye Chukwu, tells the story of prison warden Bernadine Williams (portrayed by Alfre Woodard) as she prepares to oversee her 12th execution in the aftermath of a botched execution. Chukwu said she was inspired to write the script after the controversial execution of Troy Davis, a Georgia prisoner with serious claims of innocence, in 2011. “[T]he morning after [Troy Davis] was executed, so many of us were sad and frustrated and angry. And I thought, ‘If we’re all dealing with these emotions, what must it be like for the people who had to kill him? You know, what is it like for your livelihood to be tied to the taking of human life?’ And so, that was the seed that was planted, and it was a way for me to enter an exploration of humanities that exist between prison walls.”

Chukwu said she chose to focus on the perspective of the warden “to explore and challenge the system of incarceration,” and to broaden the reach and impact of the film. “I think it would really complicate people’s thinking around the death penalty and around incarceration and the humanities that are tied to incarceration, if it’s not told through the lawyer, through the defense attorney or through a protester, but somebody who is a part of the system, somebody who might embody the values that, you know, somebody who’s for the death penalty might embody,” she said. She conducted research for Clemency by meeting with death-penalty lawyers, death-row exonerees, and former wardens like Dr. Allen Ault, an outspoken critic of the death penalty. She also volunteered on a clemency campaign for Tyra Patterson, an Ohio woman who was a life sentence for a crime she says she did not commit. Patterson was paroled in 2017 after 23 years in prison.

In her speech accepting the Best Drama prize, Chukwu said she had made the film “so we as a society can stop defining people by their worst possible acts, that we can end mass incarceration and dismantle the prison-industrial complex, and root our societies in true justice and mercy and freedom, which is all tied to our joy inside, which nobody can ever incarcerate and execute.” Chukwu is the first Black woman director to win the Sundance Grand Jury Prize.

According to new polling results, support for capital punishment in North Carolina has fallen dramatically, with only 25% of voters saying they prefer the death penalty for people convicted of first-degree murder. The poll, conducted the last week of January 2019 by Public Policy Polling, found that nearly three quarters of North Carolina voters rejected capital punishment for people convicted of murder, with 35% preferring a combination of life without parole plus a requirement to work and pay restitution; 19% preferring life without parole; 12% favoring a lengthy prison term, plus restitution, with the possibility of parole; and 6% favoring a lengthy prison term, without restitution. When asked whether North Carolina should keep the death penalty or replace it with life without parole, a majority of North Carolina voters (51%) said the state should replace the death penalty, while 44% said the state should keep it. Six percent said they were not sure.

The poll also disclosed that North Carolina voters have serious concerns about the administration of capital punishment in the state. 70% said it was likely that North Carolina has executed an innocent person. 24% said it was unlikely the state had done so. 57% said they believed it is likely that racial bias affects whether a person is sentenced to death and 75% believe defendants should be able to present evidence that racial discrimination affects capital trials. 39% said racial bias was unlikely to have affected sentencing and 18% would deny a defendant the opportunity to present evidence of bias. North Carolina voters also favored efforts to reform the state's death penalty. More than two-thirds (68%) said they favored banning the death penalty for defendants with severe mental illness. 61% favored requiring the courts to reexamine death sentences imposed in North Carolina cases tried before the state enacted a series of reforms designed to protect defendants’ rights, provide more competent representation, and ensure fair trials. Nearly three-quarters of North Carolina’s death row prisoners were sentenced before these reforms.

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Latest News

NEWS (3/13): Governor Gavin Newsom has imposed a moratorium on executions in California, granting reprieves to the 737 prisoners on the state's death row. He has also withdrawn the state's execution protocol and closed the death chamber in San Quentin prison. You can view Governor Newsom's news conference announcing the moratorium here.

TENNESSEE: The Tennessee House voted 73-22 on March 18 to pass a bill that would remove the appeal to the court of criminal appeals in death-penalty cases. HB 0258 would allow for direct appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, eliminating one level of appellate review in death-penalty cases.

ARKANSAS: The Arkansas Senate approved a sweeping execution secrecy bill on March 13 by a vote of 25-9. SB 464 would conceal from the public documents and information relating to the state's purchase of execution drugs and the identity of the drug supplier and make disclosure of such information a felony.

NEBRASKA: The Judiciary Committee of the Nebraska unicameral legislature voted 5-2 on March 15 to advance to the full Senate LB44, a bill that would repeal the state's death penalty. The legislature repealed the death penalty in 2015 and overrode Governor Rickett's veto of the bill. However, enactment of the bill was suspended pending the outcome of a voter referendum in 2016 that blocked the bill from going into effect. See Recent Legislative Activity.

TENNESSEE: The House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on Criminal Justice voted on March 13 to send HB1455 to the full committee for a hearing on whether defendants who suffered from severe mental illness at the time of the offense should be exempted from the death penalty.

NEWS (3/4): The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has overturned the death sentence of Arizona death-row prisoner Christopher Spreitz. A divided panel of the court ruled 2-1 that the Arizona courts unconstitutionally required Speitz to prove that his history of substance abuse had a causal link to the offense before it could be given any weight as mitigating evidence to potentially spare his life.

NEWS (3/4): The U.S. Supreme Court has denied certiorari in the case of Searcey v. Dean, declining to review the $28 million judgment a federal jury entered against Gage County, Nebraska as a result of the wrongful prosecution and conviction of “the Beatrice Six” for a rape and murder they did not commit. Several of the wrongfully accused falsely confessed or testified falsely against others after having been threatened with the death penalty.NEWS (3/1): The Harris County District Attorney's office has accepted the recommendation of a Special Prosecutor's report that death-row exoneree Alfred Dewayne Brown be declared "actually innocent." The declaration paves the way for Brown to collect compensation from the state of Texas for his wrongful conviction and death sentence.

NEWS (2/28): Texas has executed Billie Wayne Coble. It was the third execution in the U.S. in 2019 and the second in Texas. Coble, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, was the 560th prisoner executed in Texas since executions resumed in the 1970s, nearly 5 times more than any other state. See Execution List 2019 and Execution Database.

Texas authorities removed Coble's son Gordon Wayne Coble and grandson Dalton Wayne Coble from the execution witness room following an outburst after the lethal injection drugs were administered and charged them with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

NEWS (2/28): The California Supreme Court has upheld convictions and death sentences imposed on Oswaldo Amezcua and Joseph Flores by a Los Angeles County jury in 2005. Neither defendant presented any mitigating evidence in the penalty phase of their joint trial.

NEWS (2/28): A three-judge panel sentenced Arron Lawson to death for a quadruple murder in Lawrence County, Ohio. It was the second new death sentence of 2019, both imposed after defendants were permitted to waive their right to jury sentencing. In January, a Jackson County, Florida judge sentenced Rocky Beamon to death after Beamon waived his right to a jury sentencing and asked the court for a death sentence.

NEWS (2/22): California Governor Gavin Newsome has ordered that more extensive DNA testing be performed in the case of death-row prisoner Kevin Cooper. Cooper has long maintained his innocence of the 1983 quadruple murder for which he was sentenced to death.

NEWS (2/19): The U.S. Supreme Court has denied certiorari, declining to review an appeal filed by Arkansas Judge Wendell Griffen challenging the Arkansas Supreme Court's decision barring him from handling any capital cases as a result of his participation in an anti-death penalty rally in which he strapped himself to a gurney to protest executions.

Howard University law professor Robin Konrad, former DPIC Director of Research and Special Projects, joins Executive Director Robert Dunham and current Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue to discuss DPIC's November 2018 report, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States. Konrad, the lead author of the report, provides an overview of the expansion of state secrecy in the use of the death penalty, and the three discuss the policy implications of the lack of accountability and transparency in the administration of capital punishment.

DPIC'S YEAR END REPORT: The Death Penalty Information Center's 2018 analysis of developments in the U.S. death penalty,The Death Penalty in 2018: Year End Report reports that death-penalty usage remained near generational lows, with executions below 30 and new death sentences below 50 for the fourth straight year. The size of death row dropped nationwide for the 18th year in a row. Read the report here. Listen to our Discussions With DPIC podcast about the report here.

LATEST EXONERATION: Former death-row prisoner Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin was exonerated in Florida on November 5, 2018, as Seminole County prosecutors dropped all charges against him. He is the 164th person wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death to have been exonerated in the U.S. since 1973, and the 28th exonerated in Florida. See Innocence.

DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham testified on February 19 before the New Hampshire House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee on the bill to replace New Hampshire's death penalty with life without possibility of parole. That testimony, which addressed the question of whether the death penalty has made the public and New Hampshire police safer, has now been uploaded to YouTube. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWgyllPbXN0.

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DPIC Podcast Series: We have begun a new set of podcasts on the death penalty in each state, each with interesting historical facts. The following are now available: Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, North Dakota, Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, District of Columbia, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. Check out our podcasts now! Also listen to DPIC's podcasts on death penalty issues.